Philip Johnston has been with the Daily Telegraph for more than 20 years. He is currently assistant editor and leader writer and was previously home affairs editor and chief political correspondent.

Volcano fiasco: well done Willie Walsh

The BA chief executive Willie Walsh will in years to come be seen as one of the heroes of the great volcano shambles that closed many of Europe's airports for six days, left half a million passengers stranded and brought the economies of developing countries like Kenya that rely on air freight to transport perishable goods close to the edge of ruin.

Walsh and other European airline chiefs had been saying for days that the skies were safe. He had even flown in a BA plane at the weekend to check whether the ash from the Iceland volcano damaged the engines. It didn't.

The problem was that while there was an ash cloud no-one had thought to establish proper criteria for what levels of particles in the air constituted a danger. In other countries with active volcanoes, planes continue to take off but make sure they fly around the cloud.

The recriminations will now flood in thick and fast about the way this matter has been handled. No-one wants to fly in planes that are unsafe – but it cannot possibly have been in the interests of BA or any other airline to fly into danger since no-one would ever travel with them again if something went wrong.

All they wanted was someone to take a level-headed look at the scientific basis for the decision to close all the airports. In the event, Walsh – whose competitor airlines were starting to fly again from other European airports – took a brave decision to despatch two dozen jumbos across the Atlantic and demanded they be allowed to land in the UK. A hastily convened meeting of Ministers and the regulators, the Civil Aviation Authority, agreed that he was right and lifted a ban that everyone had been told would be in place probably until tomorrow.

Now with the airlines staring a £1bn loss in the face and thousands of travellers still trying to get home at great expense, the question that is being asked is whether it was necessary in the first place. In the meantime, hats off to Willie Walsh.